15 Narrative to Argument Sample

As a community college professor, I work with students who frequently face significant out of the classroom life challenges that directly impact their chances for success in my class. They might encounter scheduling issues with one of their multiple jobs. Maybe there’s a family health crisis that they have to help navigate or, sometimes, their financial our housing situations become so uncertain and tenuous that even attending class is difficult.

Those are clear cut and, in many cases, documentable problems. Because they’re the sorts of issues that a student can provide evidence for and that the college can often offer some kind of assistance for, there aren’t many professors who wouldn’t help out either by offering extensions, extra credit, or just additional one-on-one assistance.

Note that I said there aren’t many, not that there aren’t any. And that’s part of the problem.

The other part is this: what happens when a student encounters an out of class difficulty that isn’t so easily documented or doesn’t have such ready to share evidence? What happens to the student who misses a week of class because they just escaped their abusive relationship and they needed to spend those days finding a safe place to live? Or the student who has spent the last year struggling to deal with coming out to their family as trans and the stress has become too much to bear and they’ve withdrawn from everything, including school? Or the student who was conditioned for years to believe that expressing an opinion that wasn’t shared by everyone would only result in ridicule and failure and so the thought of presenting such an opinion to an entire classroom full of people produces such anxiety that it leaves them unable to function?

I recognize that those are all very specific examples, but they’re all real. The student dealing with the abusive relationship and the student struggling with their identity were both students in one of my classes. The third one? The student terrified of speaking in public?

That would be me.

I can (and do) empathize with the pain of those students who can’t easily document or prove that they’re dealing with a real struggle or who fear that their professor(s) might dismiss their issues because they simply assume that the student in question is just trying an updated or trickier to verify version of “my grandma just died”.

The idea that some of us – that any of us – would doubt a student’s claim about a loss like that, especially to the point of asking for a copy of the death certificate or the obituary, is a different topic but one that highlights the issue: students struggle with the same sorts of things we do but far too often we don’t offer them the same grace or understanding that we’d like others to offer us.

Many years ago, I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman, majoring in Criminal Justice at a four-year institution with an excellent reputation. Looking back on that now, I see how dumb a choice that was – the idea of me being a cop is terrifying – but it seemed like a good idea at the time, as many things do to kids that age. I was taking five courses and four of them weren’t any problem. It was that fifth class that was almost my downfall: Public Speaking.

I should’ve failed.

I should’ve failed the course and I should’ve been screwed because it was a pre-requisite for most  everything in my major and there was no reason at all for my professor to cut me any slack. I’d done the one thing she’d specifically said not to do: I skipped speech day. Not just once. Not twice. Four times. I skipped out on all four speeches we were assigned to give that semester without even emailing the professor to give her some sort of BS excuse; I just didn’t show up at all.

She’d told us the very first day of class that the only unforgiveable sin in her class was skipping the speeches. Homework could be handed in late, our one test could be made up if we weren’t happy with our grade, and there would be a few opportunities for extra credit but she was very clear – both out loud in class and in bold-typed text in the course syllabus – that any missed speeches would be zeros, without exception for anything other than a fully documented emergency reason.

I didn’t have one of those.

My reason for skipping all those speeches was simple: I hate public speaking. I HATE it. There is nothing in the world that gives me more anxiety than speaking in front of groups. Which, as a teacher, is something of a problem but back then the bigger problem was that my anxiety made me make a really, really, really dumb choice. Or, really, four dumb choices.

Since the speeches made up eighty percent of the course grade, getting four zeroes equaled out to certain failure. And certain failure meant retaking the course because I needed it to eventually complete my degree. That’s not even taking into consideration that I had a scholarship that required me to maintain a 3.0 GPA and an F in that one course might mess that up.

(I don’t know if one F would knock me below 3.0. That’s math and I don’t do math.)

I didn’t have anything close to what I thought my professor would consider a legitimate excuse and I think that is a key point – I was worried about what she would think was a valid excuse, not whether my reasons were real to me. I can imagine that student with the housing insecurity after breaking off their abusive relationship probably wondered if I would think that was a good reason for falling behind in my class. A significant part of the reason most domestic violence and abuse victims stay in their relationships as long as they do is because they’ve been conditioned to think that it “isn’t that bad”, especially if the abuse is emotional rather than physical. Why wouldn’t they wonder if someone who didn’t really know them would even believe them?

Students struggling with gender identity issues would likely feel much the same way. Imagine being my former student who hadn’t yet found a way to even tell their family that they were transgender, living in a society where the federal government tells you that your identity doesn’t actually exist.  I can have as many ‘safe space’ stickers on my door as I want (I do) but that’s not much reassurance to an eighteen-year-old who faces discrimination and prejudice in so many other spaces. And that’s not even considering the simple fact that if their issues have been caused by anxiety over not coming out to family yet, what would it do to them to think that their only hope for some sort of leniency in my class would depend on them coming out to me?

Students shouldn’t have to live in fear of being dismissed for ‘illegitimate’ excuses or be expected to put themselves at emotional risk or retraumatize themselves just to receive the most basic modicum of kindness and understanding. As professors – as teachers – we should do better than that. And do you know where I learned that lesson?

Public Speaking.

A week before the end of the semester, I went to my professor’s office. I didn’t have much hope that she’d be willing or able to help me but I’d checked the schedule for next semester and hers was the only Public Speaking course I could take. I figured I should at least apologize and try to give some sort of excuse so maybe she wouldn’t prejudge me when I showed up in her class again.

I thought about trying to bullshit her – grandma died or my dog ran away or my girlfriend cheated on me with my brother and I’d been too depressed to come to class – but my paranoia got the better of me. I worried that she’d check up on my excuse and discover that my grandmother was perfectly healthy, I didn’t have a dog or a girlfriend or a brother.

Sadly, I’ve known some colleagues who would’ve done that sort of private investigative work.

Instead, I told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: my long-held anxiety spiked and I freaked out badly and if I’d tried to give a speech I would have puked and then someone in the front row would’ve been a sympathetic puker and they would’ve puked too and I’m a sympathetic puker, so I would have puked again and it would have become a never-ending puking cycle.

Either that or I would have cried in front of everyone. Or both.

I told her that I’d prepared for the speeches – I’d even printed them all out just to show her that there had been some effort and I hadn’t been trying to be disrespectful – but when the day came, I couldn’t even get out of bed to come to class. I said I was sure she’d heard it all before and I knew I’d messed up but I didn’t want her to think as badly of me as she probably already did. I apologized one last time and told her I’d try to do better next semester.

That should’ve been the end of it. Or, really, it should’ve been the end of it the next semester when I probably still wouldn’t have been able to show up and I’d have flunked the class for a second time.

But, since I said that ‘should’ve’ been the end of it, you can probably guess that it wasn’t. She stopped me before I left her office and asked to look at my speeches. I sat there for five minutes while she looked over what I’d written and, for the first time, I started to get the sense that I really am a lot better at expressing myself on the page than out loud. Once she finished reading the speeches, she made me an offer. A one-time, take it or leave it, have to do it now offer: give my speeches to her, right there in the office and if they were good enough, she’d give me just enough credit to pass.

And that’s what I did.

I’m not gonna lie to you: I still almost puked. I was shaking by the time I finished the last speech and I know I should’ve lost all kinds of points for not making any sort of eye contact with my audience, but I finished them all. True to her word, she went right into her gradebook and entered a “D” on the final grade line. I passed and even though it damaged my GPA (and my parents were pissed) none of that mattered. I was done with Public Speaking.

At least until I became a teacher, but that’s an entirely different story.

I’ve never forgotten what she did for me; I can still remember exactly how I felt when I walked out of her office that day. She didn’t have to be that kind or take that much pity on me and I’ve had a lot of professors since – and worked with a few, too – who wouldn’t have done it. The rules are the rules, they’d say, and if you can’t follow the rules in a class, how will you ever succeed in the real world?

Maybe that’s true. Or, maybe, we’d be better off remembering that the real world (especially the 2020-2025 version of it we’ve all cried our way through) is frequently mean and unforgiving and unnecessarily cruel and so, wouldn’t we all be better off if we put just a tiny bit more empathy and compassion out into the universe?

If my Public Speaking prof had been one of those ‘real world’ professors, I might not have made it through. I honestly don’t know if I ever would have been able to pass that class or what the permanent damage would have been to my long-term goals. But something she said stuck with me even more than the passing grade. The rules, she said, are there for a reason but that reason should be to guide and help, not to punish or ruin. It wasn’t her job, she told me, to weed out those who couldn’t cut it. It was her job to give us all every chance to cut it.

I eventually graduated – six years, a different college, and three majors later – and then found my way to a career that forces me to spend every day doing the one thing I tried so hard not to do in her class. And whenever a student or one of those professors asks why I give so many chances, why I don’t penalize late work, and why I try so hard to help every student to make it through, I remember her and her offer and those awful speeches I stumbled my way through.

And then I tell people the truth. I’m just doing what I was taught.